


News Day

by onnenlintu



Series: Joutenveden Tytöt [2]
Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen, Kasvatus-verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 07:43:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16530350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnenlintu/pseuds/onnenlintu
Summary: Kasvatus-verse, some years after The Coolest Person in Joutenvesi. The world gets bigger slowly, until it gets bigger quickly.





	News Day

**Author's Note:**

> This is intended to be the second story in a short three-part series, the tale of how two sisters first gained some interesting skills, then found that those sent them on a journey their parents' generation could not have dreamed of. 
> 
> This contains some implied spoilers for Með Jötnum, although the path towards the referred-to outcome is never revealed, nor is it plot central, so they're not true spoilers.

The kitchen window was open, letting in some of the first warm-feeling air of spring, and Jaana leaned her head out of it as she heard her daughter's voice in front of the house.  
  
“Can you take this down to the postboat, too?” Tuuri had caught Emil as he left the house and immediately thrust another fat envelope full of papers into his arms. Jaana had to be amused by the sight of it. Her daughter was already taller than Emil, and still likely had growing left to do. Jaana rarely thought much about Tuuri’s father now, but she did remember the way Emil had compared his shoulders to a carthorse’s, seventeen years ago. Tuuri had clearly inherited that strapping frame, and was at least as capable as Emil of taking anything she wanted down to the postboat. However, the rest of her had come right from her mother, and the ability to boss Emil - and Onni, and Reynir, and Timo - around was apparently just as hereditary as the thick, black hair on her head.    
  
When Emil had departed, Jaana called out to her daughter. “You must have exchanged an entire tree’s worth of letters with Denmark by now.”   
  
“I put your note in there!”    
  
“Thanks! Let me know if there’s anything for us when Emil gets back from the postboat.”    
  
Pulling her head back in the window made her ears tingle. Even if it felt incredibly warm compared to the deep snow of a few weeks ago, there was enough of a bite left in the wind and water to numb you at the tips. Were it not for how well the important travelways of the lake were kept clear these days, Tuuri would have still been waiting for that distance course to resume, and have had to endure a break of several months every year. Sitting down, she flipped through the stack of papers she had been correcting, working out how many pages she had left.    
  
It was really something to see how that correspondence course functioned. Jaana hadn’t expected Tuuri to get so genuinely interested, when she'd first told her about the language-resurrection programme in Denmark. She’d only ever heard about it in the first place after getting a surprise letter, a belated but incredibly touching thanks from a man she’d helped many years before. At the time of their first meeting, she’d only been able to communicate to him via her hastily-learned scraps of Russian. Her memory of Vasiliy had been so tied to that awkwardness that at first, she had struggled to link the face she remembered to the clear Icelandic he’d written to her in. The thought of writing to thank her was nice to begin with, and the offer of inclusion in he and his Danish friend’s new initiative was flattering as well.    
  
Having to write back and say that her capacity felt stretched enough as it was had been a little sad. It was true that teaching Icelandic to people here, while slowly picking up enough Russian to talk to some of the newer traders and other passers-through in Saimaa, kept her mind easily busy enough. Still, hearing that the government of Bornholm was learning from recent history and starting to support the study of presumed-dead languages had been interesting. Luckily, Jaana having been involved in the first few weeks of contact - the contact that brought all the newest and most exciting things to Saimaa now - gave her plenty of ammo in the form of stories. It was not at all hard to unsubtly influence her daughter towards the learning she herself had no time for.    
  
“I can learn other alphabets. The stuff on the Russian wheat bags is easy - but then Onni never saw it growing up and he says that’s why he finds it impossible, so maybe it’s really annoying to start? Oh, I don’t know.” At fourteen, Tuuri had read and re-read the leaflet her mother had ordered, dithering over whether to learn a presumed-dead language from the far east or one from west of Norway. In the end, she’d decided that  _ engelsk _ was a “good starter project”, the tiny sample paragraph looking barely more different to Swedish than Icelandic did. “Maybe the eastern one later. It says it’s a lot like Finnish once you get past the alphabet.” Jaana had been unable to hide her joy at the implication that this might be merely the start of her daughter’s skill acquisition. Happening to raise her in a household where she could pick up Icelandic and Swedish, and in a region where the people of her generation learned Russian, had been a blessing already.    
  
Jaana’s meditation on her daughter’s progress in the past two years was interrupted when the spring breeze rose up again, moving the windowpane against the wall with a sharp little tap and attempting to take the papers from under her hands. Tuuletar was clearly ready to remind Jaana that she’d have no time for this later, so she got stuck back into the work, persisting despite the tedium of having read a grammatically precarious text on this approximate topic multiple times. Such was teaching.    
  
“Reynir, is it you that’s making dinner tonight?” Jaana called to him without needing to look up. She knew him by his step the moment he entered the house.     
  
“Nope, Janne’s turn. Or Sini? Maybe? Ah.” When Jaana did look up, Reynir was standing in the doorway and looking quite unsure. “I’ll ask Onni?”    
  
“Mm. Sounds sensible.” She continued working as Reynir wandered off to seek the answer to his question, and when the next interruption came it was Emil returning from the lakeshore, Tuuri already in tow and grabbing at the parcel of letters.    
  
“Viivi wrote home!” Emil extracted a letter from the pile and opened it before even bothering to sit down. Putting down the pile she’d been shuffling through, Tuuri got behind him, standing on her tiptoes and pressing him down slightly to fit her chin over his head. As Emil went to turn the first page over, she nudged him.    
  
“Slow  _ down _ , I’m not  _ quite _ as fast as you reading Swedish…”   
  
Emil paused just long enough for Tuuri to finish the page. When he got to the second one, Jaana saw him grin in amusement, Tuuri’s face moving to match a few seconds later. When they reached the end, Emil spoke. “So she’s been promoted!”    
  
“Oh! Just in time for a new hunting season to start? I didn’t think she wanted to be in charge of anyone.” Jaana gave up on the very last of her work and put it away.   
  
“It’s not that kind of promotion, it’s being part of some kind of special unit?” Emil reread parts of the last page again. “I kind of wish I could see her working. It sounds like she’s a pretty good sniper these days.”    
  
“ _ I _ should’ve started learning to shoot stuff when I was that young.” Tuuri’s disappointment at being ‘overshadowed’ by her older sister was a little funny, given that the very next thing she did was open another pack of exercises for the language she was helping resurrect. Emil closed the window against the breeze and spread the rest of the family’s letters over the table.    
  
  
******   
  
  
Onni had initially been very resistant to the idea of getting one of those entertainment radios.    
  
“It’s like having someone in your house you don’t know,  _ all the time _ . Why would anybody want that?” Of course normal radio made sense, as a tool for talking to some specific person far away. He’d never objected to that, but the idea of getting “programmes” to his house seemed quite useless. Did he not have enough to do?   
  
Reynir had found it extremely funny. Apparently in Reykjavik they’d had one of those in every cafe, and people had been bringing them into their homes already by the time Reynir had left. “Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for them to make it over here. I guess the price has dropped a lot since the turn of the century...”   
  
“Maybe people here are just  _ sensible _ .” Onni had been quickly proven wrong on that front, as everybody else in the house reacted with great enthusiasm to the idea. Even Lalli had not found the thought of it quite as annoying as Onni did. When it had arrived, it had been so small, nothing like the big button-panelled things he’d seen in the military. Even Reynir had been a little surprised, more used to something you had to reserve an arm to carry. The first few channels they found contained mostly Swedish, but acting on the tip of a friend from across the water, Tuuri finally found the tail end of a Finnish broadcast.    
  
_ “Those in southern Saimaa are advised that scout reports predict unusual troll activity well into September this year, but a cold October should be on its way. Travel towards Ladoga is expected to resume as normal by October 15th…” _   
  
The signal started to die as they listened, and before it could totally fade away, Tuuri picked it up and started to wind the crank on its side again. The light whirring of electricity being generated covered up the sound of the broadcast crackling back to life, but once it had been powered up again, the voice came through freshly loud and clear. 

_ “...Broadcast begins again tomorrow at 18, ending at 21 as usual. Good night.” _   
  
“I wonder if it picks up news from Norway?” Tuuri started cycling between programmes, and Onni got sick of the sound of conversations being chopped up very quickly. As he was retreating back upstairs, he heard her whoop of joy at discovering that just as she’d heard, there was a channel for that Bornholm-based language programme she’d been enjoying. He was still not at all convinced that this hobby of hers would ever see much use, but perhaps this was a somewhat valid reason to keep the radio around, if she could listen to the daily programme rather than waiting on the post.    
  
Winter approached, and people’s time around the radio got longer. Sini discovered that there was a music programme that came from Russia, recordings of intricate music made with violins and an instrument Emil called a piano, twinkling and plonking like a rapid. It was good that it came on bizarrely late at night, because she got uncharacteristically snippy about anyone even trying to change the channel during its slot. While not nearly so insistent on it, Lalli was found hovering in the kitchen when it came on too, sitting with Sini and waiting for the short breaks in the music to turn the crank a little more. Emil and Reynir competed over the fact that the news programmes from their home countries overlapped, and when nobody else had something specific they wanted, Tuuri remained glued to it every time she had the chance. Onni would probably never truly get what her fascination with it was. Reynir laughed at him again, and followed his “You were born eighty years old!” with a kiss on the cheek.    
  
The summer after they got the radio, Onni finally decided he liked it after all. Janne had gone to work in the Saimaa docklands for a few summers of his late teens, so it wasn’t a surprise when Tuuri had the same idea. Onni always fretted about Viivi having gone so far, had fretted during Janne’s thankfully brief time away, and his reaction to the youngest of them all going to the far southern end of the lake was yet more fretting. Nobody even bothered trying to stop him listening to the Saimaa news broadcast every single night, slowly turning the radio’s crank to keep it powered through the announcement of every noteworthy event across the region.   
  
“You’re as bad as Tuuri now”, Jaana had said, and Onni had just huffed at her. He didn’t know how “she’s turning nineteen this summer, Onni” was meant to be a compelling argument against him worrying. It wasn’t even the worst kind of worry, the debilitating sort that had in the past kept him red-eyed with tearfulness and lost sleep. It was just fretting, on a level that many other people might have felt, and he felt it wasn’t particularly strange to indulge it.    
  
Reynir’s _what are you like, Onni?_ giggling was always fond amusement rather than malice, and his tone was even purer fondness when he found Onni by the radio this time. Onni heard Reynir coming up behind his chair, then felt an arm around him and fingers in his hair.    
  
“Does it make you feel better?” Reynir’s voice was even softer and quieter than the slow, placid monotone of the announcer.    
  
“Mm.” Onni closed his eyes at the fingers lightly massaging his skull. “I think so.”    
  
“Good.” Reynir kept idly stroking the top of Onni’s head, and his concentration drifted. It was past the local news now anyway, taking the time now as it always did to tell of a few happenings elsewhere in the world. It was very unlikely that any of it would be affecting any member of this family.    
  
“ _ An outpost in Norway has reported contact with a group of unknown foreigners they are calling the “feather-cloaked people”, and communication about their origins has so far been impossible. We have a recorded eyewitness account from a Finn serving there - ”  _ __   
__   
  
********** __   
  
__   
_ “ - Viivi Västerström, who has met the feather-cloaked people in person. Our apologies for the quality of recording…” _ __   
__   
“Fuck!” Tuuri sat up in her bunk, her movement making the precarious structure sway so much the radio almost fell to the floor. “That’s my sister!”    
  
“Watch it!” Tasha in the bunk below was the one who actually owned this radio, and while she’d been letting all the other seasonal workers listen to it in the evenings, she was very protective of it. As Viivi’s voice started up, Tuuri struggled not to move too much again. She hadn’t heard Viivi’s voice in over a year, and hearing it now unexpectedly was a fantastic surprise.    
  
Tuuri caught the end of a Swedish  _ “Oh, you want it in Finnish?” _ before the bulk of the interview began.  _ “So, our unit hasn’t actually seen much of the newcomers, they’ve been put in quarantine pretty quickly. They aren’t happy about it but they seem to be cooperating, so far. What I can tell you is that I’ve never seen tattoos like that anywhere before - all over the cloak guy's face like waves and knots, I think he must be a mage - ”  _ __   
__   
“It is really your sister?” Another of the Russian girls, one Tuuri knew likely wasn’t totally catching how interesting this was, piped up. She was quickly shushed by everyone else as they waited for more details of this potentially wild story.     
  
_ “It’s hard to work out what language they’re speaking, definitely nobody on this base speaks anything they do. We’re not even sure they’re always speaking the same language, but my personal theory is that uh - if there’s anyone in Saimaa who has been learning en-glan-ti, we might have work for them.”  _   
  
_ “Do you think you’ll reach someone with that message?” _ The Finn recording Viivi’s account sounded doubtful.    
  
_ “I think it might.”  _ __   
__   
_ “Interesting. And how long has it been since they arrived off the coast of Norway?” _ __   
__   
_ “The shepherd that first encountered them reached our base two days ago, so -” _ __   
__   
Tuuri swore again. Now it was her turn to be shushed, and she lay back down on her bunk, trying to process what she was hearing. Her sister’s voice, bizarre in its familiarity through the crackling, continued to describe the events of the past few days in her part of the world. The careful emphasis she’d put on the language she knew Tuuri had been learning couldn’t have been an accident, not after she’d been told in Emil’s constant letters about Tuuri’s “hilarious radio addiction”, and she wouldn’t just get her hopes up like that -    
  
It was only 20:45. They were generous with letting the generator run on this summer, and the contact radio in the records house would still be usable. Shimmying with as much care as speed allowed down the ladder to the ground, Tuuri found her trousers and pulled them on before barging out the door. Feet bare against the warm, smooth wood of the dockside boardwalks, she ran with a racing heart into the bright and mosquito-laden evening.    



End file.
